Monthly Archives: January 2012

Output…

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As a rule, I try to write 300-500 words a day. That doesn’t include anything I write for this blog or others I contribute to from time to time. It definitely doesn’t include anything I write at work – Nothing is more hostile to good writing than applying the Army writing manual. And it absolutely doesn’t include texts, emails, or other sneaky ways you can easily get into that range. As with most things that I actually enjoy doing, the biggest issue is figuring out when the hell I actually have time to sit down and focus on just one thing at a time. That’s not a complaint, just a statement of fact.

The reality is, I might actually hit that goal once or twice during the week if I’m lucky. Weekends are a little easier to manage. Usually after letting the dogs out and getting them fed, I can settle in for an hour or two early on Saturday and SUnday mornings and punch out about 1000 words without too much trouble. Mornings seem to be best for me. I’ve gone back and reread things I’ve written in the hour before bed the next morning and let’s just say it’s not my best work. Not even close. Back when I was a history major, I wrote my best stuff after midnight. A decade’s worth of crawling out of bed to the 5AM alarm seems to have brought that to an end once and for all. I don’t really mind that so much, though, as long as some point in the day is still a good time for it.

Picking up aluminum cans on the side of the road would probably be a more lucrative use of time, but something keeps me coming back to the keyboard day after day. As soon as I figure out why that is, I’ll probably have found my best seller.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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By popular demand, I’m pleased to post the 15th installment of What Annoys Jeff this Week. I promise, unless I’m cut down by another bout of the sickness, that I’ll do my best to keep up with it as a regular feature.

1. Primary Elections. The field of potential candidates starts out vast, but by the time a state with a real population gets around to voting the field has already shrunk to just a handful. By the time the great State of Maryland gets around to holding its primaries on April 3rd, it’s a pretty good bet that the field will have already narrowed down to one. Letting the party unite behind a single candidate early is great… for the candidate and for the party. It’s pretty crummy for the voters, though. If we can all agree that our national general election day is always going to be the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, surely we can come up with a similarly convoluted methodology for holding primary elections all on the same day. So, you know, my vote here in Maryland is worth as much as the ones cast in New Hampshire or South Carolina. I’ll hold my breath waiting on that good idea to take hold.

2. Sub-freezing Weather. Sure, I know everyone complains about the weather but nobody does anything about it. This is a blog after all, so it’s only real mission in life is to serve as a voice box for all the bitching and complaining I can come up with… Which is why I’m going to announce my official opposition to temperatures anywhere below 32 degrees. The only purpose of being that cold is to enable snow production and if there’s not going to be snow (and the accompanying day off from work), then it has no business being below freezing. There. I said it.

3. Ground Coffee. I’d be willing to say that my daily intake of coffee is probably higher than the average person, but that’s a topic for a different discussion. All I really want is just to be able to buy a pound of ground coffee. I don’t want a 12 ounce package, or God forbid, the 10.5 ounce size that I almost picked up. One pound of coffee gets me exactly through one week. It’s the perfect proportion of requirement to availability. 10.5 ounces, on the other hand, gets me to about Wednesday… for the same price I was paying for a full pound back in the “good old days”… You know, four or five years ago. I’m sure someone ran a focus group and said people would rather get a smaller size for the same cost than get the same size for a greater cost, but what that didn’t take into account was the people in that focus group were apparently morons. Seriously. Just give me a pound of coffee and if you have to charge me $12 instead of $8, I’ll live with that. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that decreased supply means increased price and with the notion that inflation drives up the price of everything over time. Trying to pull a slick one with packaging, though, just makes you look like a bunch of tools.

A matter of trust…

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After more years than I care to think about in service, there comes a point when the operational assumption should be that you know more or less what you’re doing. Sure, that’s probably not true for some people, but I’m fairly sure that I’ve earned enough stripes to be at least considered competent in most situations. Sure, I’m not going to be the most dynamic presenter or dazzle them with the brilliance of my PowerPoint slides, but I’ll get the meat of the matter across in a clear and concise way that our glorious leaders should at least find informative and useful.

I’m absolutely not asking for carte blanche to do whatever I feel like doing, but I think a reasonable basis to proceed would be to start with the premise that I know how to build slides using a template, I have a better than average grip on the subject matter, and won’t, as a rule, say things to the most senior of senior leaders that would reflect badly on me, you, or the 4 layers of management between me and the guy at the end of the table. As I’ve said before, my goal is to do whatever is going to cause me the least grief in the long run. I believe strongly in the importance of self preservation. In this case, that would involve making a solid enough presentation that the number of questions at the end will be held to a minimum. I know I’m still pretty new in this office, but at some point you’re going to have to trust that I’m not going to walk in and call the Old Man an asshat and piss my pants.

If nothing else, let us consider that I’m going to be the lowest graded guy in the room by a country mile. The chances of the mighty and powerful jumping up and down on my head for a minor mistake are between slim and none. If the worst happens and I completely lose the bubble, you can always blame it on me as the new guy, so really, no matter how it goes, the bases are all covered.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Blackout…

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As a general rule, I’m not a joiner. I don’t show up at protests and I don’t use my blog as a forum for anyone’s opinions other than mine. Today is an exception. S. 968 – The Protect IP Act is bad public policy and amounts to nothing short of censorship on a scale this country has never seen. Essentially, this Act would grant the government a nearly unfettered ability to order private companies and individuals to remove content, hide content from search engines, and generally make it impossible to continue using the internet as a means of freely exchanging ideas that it has been since its inception. The theft of intellectual property is absolutely wrong and should be prosecuted. Allowing blanket censorship of the internet, however, is like using a nuclear bomb to shoo a fly.

I urge everyone reading this to contact your Members of Congress and tell them that a free and open internent is in the national interest and that they should oppose efforts to censor what we can and cannot see online.

Go global…

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Say what you want about the evils of the global economy, but I’m an unabashed fan. Sure, it means we have to compete with countries that can manufacture just about everything cheaper than we can, but I think that misses the up side… Like being able to order something from Europe last night at 9:30 and having it sitting in Philadelphia 18 hours later waiting to clear Customs and get delivered to your door. I mean isn’t a little friendly competition a small price to pay for that kind of luxury and convenience?

I’ve traveled enough to know that the world’s too small a place to pretend that we can raise the drawbridge and keep everything out. By all means, we should regulate it, set the conditions under which it happens, and fight hard in those areas where we have a comparative advantage, but we can’t roll back the clock on international commerce any more than we can command the tides to go in or out. We need to encourage the kind of world where we can order anything, from anywhere and have it delivered in a day or two. It’s good for us as consumers, it’s good for them as merchants and manufacturers, and it forces us to take a realistic look at the kinds of things our own economy should be doing in the future. If going global isn’t a win-win scenario, I don’t know what is.

Leave…

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One of the best aspects of working for the bureaucracy is that we earn four hours of sick leave every two weeks. With 26 pay periods a year that adds up to 104 hours of sick time earned. The hours that you don’t use by the end of the year roll over into a reserve pot you can draw on in the future. It’s a good system and a cheap insurance policy against future illness. I’ve got something like 600 hours of sick leave on the books now, which is a pretty good indication that I’m not using the time to go shopping or head to the beach. Then again, when I’m not feeling up to par, I have no issue with dipping into those hours and keeping my ass at home until I feel better. Even then, it’s unusual for me to need more than one or two days in a row. But when I do, I’m going to take it without feeling guilty.

I’ve spent half my career banking a shit ton of leave and then when the flu kicks my ass, I’m going to use as much of it as I need to. I’m not going to come in until I feel something close to human again. That’s just the way it’s going to be. When I get back, I’m happy to pick up wherever I left off and get my projects back on track. What I’m not going to do is come back and start staying late to “make up” for being out. I made up for being out by burning off some of those accumulated hours of sick leave. Those are hours you’re not going to have to pay me for a decade or two in the future when I decide to punch out for the last time. I’m happy to stick around and work as late as anyone wants, but I won’t be doing it for free. There’s always going to be more work that needs done and some of it wouldn’t have gotten done even if I had been in the office. I don’t feel bad about that during any normal week and I definitely won’t feel bad about it when I’ve spent a week flat on my back.

If we need to work longer to get something done, feel free to cross my palm with silver or add back a few hours into my leave account. Trying to guilt me into giving it away just isn’t going to be something that works for either of us.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

Time…

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I’ve had three days off and it hasn’t exactly been one of those nice restful weekends that everyone wants. Between cleaning, vet visits, picking up groceries, more cleaning, laundry, and sundry other odds and ends, I’m not feeling rested at all. I’m sure it doesn’t help that most of those things are what I’ve been putting off for the last two weeks, but still, how about a little time to do nothing at all? Yeah. That’s not going to happen. The good news is that the house is (mostly) clean and there’s a refrigerator full of food again, but that’s not something I can really hang my hat on when I wonder where the long weekend went. It’s all stuff that needed done, of course, but I get the distinct feeling that I’m spinning my wheels, since most of it will all need to be done again next weekend.

What I need is more time. Just a few more hours in the day maybe. Or at this point I’d settle for figuring out a way to better use those six “wasted” hours in the middle of the night when I’m busy just laying there. Ranting about it hasn’t seemed to do much good, so I’d better get moving and make the most out of the couple of hours I’ve got left this afternoon. Sheesh, and I thought time only flew when you were having fun.

Getting right…

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Today is the first time I’ve actually felt well since December 30th. Two weeks doesn’t seem like a long time until you spend most of it feeling like warm death. So, in a phrase, I’m very happy to put the worst of this bug behind me. The house is a wreck, there’s not a bit of food in the pantry, and the dogs seem a little surprised to see me doing something other than laying around on the couch. It seems that the priority for the rest of the weekend will be trying to undo two weeks of laziness. Giving the place a good scrub should probably be the first thing on the list. This house has a creepy ability to attract dust and grime. I think getting rid of it will go a long way towards confirming for myself that I’m actually feeling better. Other than that, plans for the long weekend include absolutely nothing other than possibly sticking my nose in a book and keeping the hot coffee flowing. Some people wouldn’t find that fulfilling, but after not doing much other than staring at the TV, anything that engages the brain is a welcome change of pace.

Rules…

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I’m never going to be nominated for sainthood. I’ve made my peace with that. Still, there are some unbreakable, iron clad rules that I live my life by. They’re not negotiable under any circumstances. Not ever. That’s not to say I’m not tempted to break them on an almost daily basis. One thing I’ve noticed though, is the moments when you’re most tempted to break your own rules are generally the moments when they should apply the most. Rules are pesky things like that. It’s almost unfortunate.

Lipstick on a pig…

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In the fine tradition of bureaucracies everywhere, I was reminded again this morning how vitally important it is that we say exactly what we mean, especially when using email. I mean we all know how temperamental and difficult to use that can be, right? I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m a simple foot soldier in this corner of this operation, but regardless of whether I title an email “Miami Trip Meeting” or the officially preferred “South Florida Assistance Visit,” everyone in the building knows the big dogs are going to Miami in February while the rest of us freeze our hoohaas off back here at the home office. Hey, it’s ok. We all know that age and seniority bring their privileges. But for God’s sake, when the instructions sent out include not scheduling any meetings before 10:00 or after 2:30, let’s not insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending this is anything other than a good old fashioned boondoggle.

Thanks, and enjoy your South Florida Assistance Visit.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.